A friend and I were sitting around, attempting to put the world to rights, when our conversation turned to the Youth Of Today. My friend is a teaching assistant so our conversations usually veer in that direction. We ended up agreeing that all young people were either in gangs, unduly influenced by Instagram or likely to engage in acts of violence at the drop of a hat.

None of that is true of course.

But it IS satisfying to moan and commiserate about worries that we, as the parents of grown up children, can do little about.

I am not 100% sure it is healthy though.

I can look out of my window and actually see the Youth Of Today walking past, on their way to school, popping to the shops or walking their dogs, but none of them are mugging little old ladies or posing for selfies as they are doing it (they may be mugging people in their spare time, just not as they walk past my home).

So I ask myself, how much of the stress and anxiety I feel about the state of the world comes from my own expectations? How much of the doom and gloom I have absorbed is actually real?

There most definitely are real people causing real damage and harm, but not every young person is a rabid, internet obsessed, hooligan out to cause as much heartache as possible. I distinctly remember when everything wrong in the world was the fault of single parents (of which I was one) and how unfair that felt. I am not going to do that to everyone under the age of 25 anymore (in my own head…but come too close and it’s still ‘Get off my lawn’ time, some things I just can’t change).